Lenin - Collected Work - v. 29 - March-August 1919

Pré-visualização

pro-
101DRAFT PROGRAMME OF THE R.C.P.(B.)
letarians and narrowing the role of others in the social
and economic sphere, and in some places making them more or
less completely, more or less obviously, more or less pain-
fully dependent on capital.
(6) “Moreover, this technical progress enables the employ-
ers to make growing use of female and child labour in
the process of production and exchange of commodities.
And since, on the other hand, it causes a relative decrease in
the employers’ demand for human labour-power, the demand
for labour-power necessarily lags behind its supply, as
a result of which the dependence of wage-labour on capital is
increased and exploitation of labour rises to a higher level.
(7) “This state of affairs in the bourgeois countries and
the steadily growing competition among them in the world
market make it more and more difficult for them to sell
the goods which are produced in ever-increasing quantities.
Over-production, manifesting itself in more or less acute
industrial crises followed by more or less protracted periods
of industrial stagnation, is an inevitable consequence of the
development of the productive forces in bourgeois society.
Crises and periods of industrial stagnation, in their turn,
still further ruin the small producers, still further increase
the dependence of wage-labour on capital, and lead still
more rapidly to the relative and sometimes to the absolute
deterioration of the condition of the working class.
(8) “Thus, improvement in technology, signifying increased
labour productivity and greater social wealth, becomes in
bourgeois society the cause of greater social inequality, of
widening gulfs between the rich and poor, of greater inse-
curity, unemployment, and various hardships of the mass
of the working people.
(9) “However, in proportion as all these contradictions,
which are inherent in bourgeois society, grow and develop,
so also does the discontent of the toiling and exploited
masses with the existing order of things grow; the numerical
strength and solidarity of the proletarians increase and
their struggle against their exploiters is sharpened. At the
same time, by concentrating the means of production and
exchange and socialising the process of labour in capitalist
enterprises, the improvement in technology more and more
rapidly creates the material possibility of capitalist pro-
V. I. LENIN102
duction relations being superseded by communist relations,
i.e., the possibility of bringing about the social revolution,
which is the ultimate aim of all the activities of the inter-
national communist party as the conscious exponent of
the class movement of the proletariat.
(10) “By introducing social in place of private ownership
of the means of production and exchange, by introducing
planned organisation of social production to ensure the
well-being and many-sided development of all the members
of society, the proletarian social revolution will do away
with the division of society into classes and thereby eman-
cipate the whole of oppressed humanity, for it will put an
end to all forms of exploitation of one section of society by
another.
(11) “A necessary condition for this social revolution is
the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the conquest by the
proletariat of such political power as will enable it to sup-
press all resistance on the part of the exploiters. Aiming at
making the proletariat capable of fulfilling its great his-
toric mission, the international communist party organises
the proletariat in an independent political party opposed
to all the bourgeois parties, guides all the manifestations
of its class struggle, reveals to it the irreconcilable antago-
nism between the interests of the exploiters and those of the
exploited, and explains to the proletariat the historical
significance of and the necessary conditions for the impend-
ing social revolution. At the same time it reveals to all
the other toiling and exploited masses the hopelessness of
their position in capitalist society and the need for a social
revolution if they are to free themselves from the yoke of
capital. The Communist Party, the party of the working
class, calls upon all sections of the working and exploited
population to join its ranks insofar as they adopt the stand-
point of the proletariat.”
* * *
(12) World capitalism has at the present time, i.e., about
the beginning of the twentieth century, reached the stage
of imperialism. Imperialism, or the epoch of finance capi-
tal is a high stage of development of the capitalist economic
103DRAFT PROGRAMME OF THE R.C.P.(B.)
system, one in which monopoly associations of capitalists—
syndicates, cartels, and trusts—have assumed decisive im-
portance; in which enormously concentrated banking capital
has fused with industrial capital; in which the export of
capital to foreign countries has assumed vast dimensions;
in which the whole world has been divided up territorially
among the richer countries, and the economic carve-up of
the world among international trusts has begun.
(13) Imperialist wars, i.e., wars for world domination,
for markets for banking capital and for the subjugation of
small and weaker nations, are inevitable under such a state
of affairs. The first great imperialist war, the war of 1914-18,
is precisely such a war.
(14) The extremely high level of development which world
capitalism in general has attained, the replacement of free
competition by monopoly capitalism, the fact that the banks
and the capitalist associations have prepared the machinery
for the social regulation of the process of production and
distribution of products, the rise in the cost of living and
increased oppression of the working class by the syndicates
due to the growth of capitalist monopolies, the tremendous
obstacles standing in the way of the proletariat’s economic
and political struggle, the horrors, misery, ruin, and bru-
talisation caused by the imperialist war—all these factors
transform the present stage of capitalist development into
an era of proletarian socialist revolution.
That era has dawned.
(15) Only a proletarian socialist revolution can lead hu-
manity out of the impasse which imperialism and imperial-
ist wars have created. Whatever difficulties the revolution
may have to encounter, whatever possible temporary set-
backs or waves of counter-revolution it may have to con-
tend with, the final victory of the proletariat is inevitable.
* * *
(16) The victory of the proletarian revolution calls for
the complete confidence, the closest fraternal alliance and
the greatest possible unity of revolutionary action on the
part of the working class of all the advanced countries.
These conditions cannot be created without a determined,
V. I. LENIN104
principled rupture with, and a relentless struggle against,
those bourgeois distortions of socialism that have gained
the upper hand in the top echelons of the vast majority of
official “Social-Democratic” and “socialist” parties.
(17) One such distortion, on the one hand, is the trend
of opportunism and social-chauvinism, socialism in words
but chauvinism in deeds, the concealment of the defence
of the predatory interests of one’s “own” national bourgeoi-
sie behind the slogan of “defence of the fatherland”, both
in general and during the imperialist war of 1914-18 in
particular. This trend has come into being because in nearly
all the advanced countries, the bourgeoisie, by plundering
the colonial and weak nations, has been able to bribe the
upper stratum of the proletariat with crumbs from the
superprofits, to ensure them in peace-time a tolerable, petty-
bourgeois existence, and to take the leaders of that stratum
into its service. The opportunists and social-chauvinists,
being servants of the bourgeoisie,